


Dancing Lights

by quantumoddity



Series: Widomauk Modern AU [10]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Adopted Children, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Caleb and Molly being cute dads, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, New Parents, Nightmares, Parenthood, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 09:10:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15682368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumoddity/pseuds/quantumoddity
Summary: Mollymauk and Caleb have been parents for a few weeks now and are quickly realising that the most difficult part of being fathers is the hurts they can't heal





	Dancing Lights

Caleb had become very used to waking up to the sound of screaming, even before he became a father. And he did have to admit, the shrill, plaintive cries of his daughter were much preferable to the echoing, hollow screams of his nightmares.

He sat up, vision soft and unreliable as sleep still clung stubbornly to his exhausted mind. But with a press of the heels of his hands against his eyes and a few deep breaths, he won the fight for his own consciousness and could now pick out the room around him. He and Mollymauk had never kept a particularly tidy apartment and, with most of their time taken up with raising their newborn, things had only dissolved more into chaos. Books were scattered across the floor, the piles they’d been in finally stacked too high to support themselves, with bookmarks jutting up at random points through their pages and the sides thick and dog eared from frequent readings and highlighting of passages and scribbling his own annotations in the margins to try and tweak the spells inside. In amongst that was clothes, Molly’s in a vast array of colours to rival any artist’s pallet and all of Caleb’s sticking resolutely to the beige, brown and mustard end of the spectrum, much to his husband’s mortification. A few plants in various stages of their death throes sat on the windowsill, looking ghostlike in the moonlight, amongst glass bottles, misshapen crystals and other purposeless trinkets Caleb had collected over his time. Home, in a word and it made his tired, frayed nerves relax a little to find himself still in amongst it all, his sleepy mind often fretful that he’d wake up one day and find the life he loved so much and had worked so hard to build snatched away.

Mollymauk stirred in the blankets behind him, always slower to wake than Caleb even when their daughter was at full bellow.

He felt his tail buffet the small of his back lazily and a voice that sounded like it was coming from the pits of hell mumble, “Tell me that’s not our baby girl. Tell me that’s the sounds of a ten car pile-up outside our window.”

Caleb managed a rough chuckle, reaching back and stroking his husband’s hair out of his eyes, “Afraid not. I’ll see to her, you go back to sleep.”

Molly slumped immediately back into the pillows from where he’d managed to rise by a few increments. “I adore you,” he moaned, “You’re the light of my life. I’m so blessed.”

“Yeah yeah…” Caleb grinned, staggering up and snatching the closest piece of fabric that looked vaguely t-shirt shaped. It turned out to be the cast t-shirt from Molly’s theatre’s production of Oklahoma.

With that and his slippers, he picked his way around the clutter on the floor and made his way to the nursery, just next door. Doing so, he caught the attention of Frumpkin, curled up on one of Molly’s scarves on top of the dresser. With a blink of his amber eyes, he was up and wobbling sleepily after his master, having apparently taken it to heart that the small, green, noisy little monster his master had brought home a few weeks ago was his responsibility too.

The nursery was a warm, inviting space, all soft butter yellow walls and rainbows painted on the walls and toys spilling off every surface, gifts from their daughter’s team of eager aunts and uncles. However, the effect was a little tarnished by the howling coming from the crib.

“Hey now, hey,” Caleb murmured gently as he reached in and plucked his daughter from her nest of blankets, “What’s the matter?”

Una, still as frighteningly tiny as the day they brought her home, most of her form taken up by the enormous, bat like ears that dwarfed the rest of her, clung to her papa with sharp little nails, hanging off him with a desperation that suggested to him that she’d had yet another nightmare.

“Oh, mein Süßling…” Caleb sighed gently, rocking her in his arms as best he could when she was clawing the front of his shirt, “Everything’s okay, don’t worry.”

Still, the little goblin cried, at a volume that seemed almost unbelievable for how small she was, no matter how many times her papa walked her around the room slowly or murmured to her in soft German or stroked her tight mop of black curls. Frumpkin put his front paws up on Caleb’s shoulder from where he crouched on the changing table, sniffling hopefully at Una, but not even the sight of her friend could make the tears stop.

Nightmares were heartbreakingly common for their new daughter. The nurses at the orphanage couldn’t say how she’d come to be left with them, who had done the leaving, what had happened to her parents, what she’d been through in just the few days she’d been alive before she fell into Caleb and Molly’s laps. But from the way she clung to them, the way she’d wake up crying and shaking in the night, the way she couldn’t seem to shift her perpetual sickness, Caleb couldn’t imagine those days had been sweet. Just another reason he’d brought her home, that he always held her for longer than he really needed to, that he saw a little bit of himself in her large, round eyes.

“Still no luck?”

Caleb looked up, surprised for a moment, seeing a very sleep tousled Mollymauk leaning in the doorway of the nursery, naked but for a loosely tied robe that hung off his lithe shoulders. He felt more than a few stirrings at the sight (parenthood had been seriously eating into their time for other things, not just cleaning).

“No,” he shrugged helplessly, as Una still fussed and grizzled in his arms, “I said you could go back to sleep?”

Molly shook his head, coming to stand by him, “I felt guilty. And besides, this sounds like a two dad job.”

“It might be,” Caleb had to admit, shifting Una to his other shoulder, as if that would make all the difference, “Something’s upset her really badly.”

“Dreams again?” Molly asked delicately, expression softening sympathetically as his husband nodded.

The tiefling pressed a kiss to his daughter’s fuzzy head, feeling the same heavy, bitter uselessness as Caleb. The hardest part about having a baby, they’d quickly realised, was knowing there were some hurts they couldn’t heal for her.

“Here, can you take her for a second?” Caleb sat up a little straighter, an idea suddenly coming to him, “I think I might have something…”

Molly took Una, where she clung to him every bit as tightly as she had to Caleb and whimpered miserably, sliding down to the rocking chair, “Oh?”

The wizard got on his knees in front of them, holding out one palm, “I’ve been practising this, I thought she might like it…”

He moved his long fingers rhythmically, almost as if he was beckoning something that no one could see but him. Molly was confused briefly, until he saw a warm, ethereal glow start to bud between his husband’s fingers. It pulsed softly, leaving tracks of fading light along its path that disappeared after a few moments, growing and unfurling slowly like some odd kind of plant until it broke free of Caleb’s hold and bobbed through the shadowed room, a free floating orb of off white light.

“Wow, babe,” Molly blinked, admiringly. Of course his husband had much more powerful magic than glowing lights but there was something especially beautiful about this, borne of its simplicity, the innocence it seemed to hold as it wavered there in amongst the dark.

“Thanks,” Caleb looked proud as he let another form, more blue than white this time, and then another and another, rose and sunshine and butter and teal, blooming from his palms until the room seemed full of their own, private collection of stars.

And Una was utterly transfixed. Her tears stuttered and stilled, mouth opening in awe to reveal her little rosebud pink tongue, one thin little arm pulling away to reach for them as they floated past.

Molly beamed down at her, hand gently cradling the back of her head, “Look what your clever old papa did for you, darling…”

Caleb snorted, though he was every bit as thrilled at the clear joy on Una’s little face. Nightmares were entirely forgotten, everything they had to worry about, all the chores that needed doing, tomorrow’s anxieties were all completely left behind for the few hours the little family spent together with Caleb’s lights. All the hurts they shared, that would never fully heal faded away just the tiniest bit as they laughed together.

And that was all they could hope for.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr, @my-dearesteliza and I also have a ko-fi if you'd like to help out with funding my writing! Please consider leaving a comment, it's a 100% free and easy way to make my day!


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